Examination of Witnesses (Questions 46
- 59)
TUESDAY 2 JUNE 2009
MR ANDY
RUTHERFORD, MR
GORDON MCGRANAHAN
AND MS
LOUISE MEINCKE
Q46 Chairman:
Thank you very much. Good morning. I wonder for the record if
you would introduce yourselves.
Ms Meincke:
I am Louise. I work for the Consortium for Street Children as
the Advocacy Manager. We are a network of about 57 UK-based NGOs
working with street children worldwide, who work mainly through
local partners on the ground in about 100 countries. We are mainly
set up to advocate and promote the rights of street children worldwide.
We work with and lobby DFID and also international organisations
like UNICEF.
Mr Rutherford: My name is Andy
Rutherford. I am the Head of International Partnerships at One
World Action. We are a UK-based agency, we work with partner organisations
in about 18 countries across Asia and Africa and Latin America,
and we have a strong focus on strengthening women's political
participation and also promoting local participation in local
decision-making.
Mr McGranahan: My name is Gordon
McGranahan. I am Head of the Human Settlements Group at the International
Institute for Environment and Development. We have been working
on urban poverty and environment issues for, I guess, over 30
years now. Mostly it is research with partners on the ground.
In recent years also we have been involved in funding a grants
programme looking particularly at urban poverty, housing and water
and sanitation in Africa and Latin America.
Q47 Chairman:
Thank you all three for those introductions. You will appreciate
that we are looking at urbanisation in a situation where, however
you define it, it would appear the majority of people are living
in towns and cities and clearly that is where a lot of the poverty
and problems are concentrated. In one sense the argument is that
urbanisation is an indication of success. It promotes growth.
It is a sign of people living together in economic benefit, but
on the other hand there are an awful lot of poor people living
in slums in poor conditions. So do you have a view on why slums
continue to have such basically poor facilities, poor infrastructure,
and to what extent do you think the fact that poor people do not
have any control over their property rights and they do not have
property rights contributes to that problem?
Mr Rutherford: One of the fundamental
problems is legal access to land. One of the countries which was
a focus of our submission is Angola and the Luanda Urban Property
Programme which found that the legal access to land has been a
major challenge. There are no effective land rights for the people
who live in the majority of the slums in the capital. About three
million people out of four and a half million live in slums, and
land access and land entitlement is a key area. The question is,
how do you confront it, how do you deal with it? There has been
a participatory approach to trying to resolve that. The first
consultation process, which was supported by One World Action
and also received support from DFID, which was excellent, led
to public consultation on the first draft land law. This is a
step forward but the fundamental issue of secure tenure and no
threat of eviction or demolition, which happens many times, remains
a major issue. One of the effects of economic growth, and also
the attraction of the city for economic development, of course,
is the battle for land which you have seen in many of the places
you have visited and also in your day-to-day work. How you deal
with that is precisely by recognising it as an issue, recognising
that the law and the legal process have to be resorted to but
also by trying to develop laws in a participatory way, that the
basic approach to defining where temporary land entitlement has
been given is that it is something that is always there, that
is the evidence and is made visible and is part of the process
of developing the regulations and the local mapping processes
which can be a transition to secure land titles. Generally that
does not happen and the lack of participation in that transition
phase sets up a whole series of conflicts and disputes which are
evident across the world. We therefore come back to the basics
of participation, transparency, accountability and referral to
information in those transition lands where the legal process
spreads, but it is in the context where existing access to the
land and some form of entitlement of people to pay for it in some
shape or form, legally or illegally, has to be brought into that
process—very complex, very sensitive, but fundamental.
Q48 Chairman:
Is it fundamentally a failure of government, either local or national
government? We have seen, for example, CLIFF[1],
which DFID fund, using their infrastructure finance facility,
which claims to have had success in securing tenure, that it is
your right to be there and there is a right to get some kind of
investment in basic services. How adequate a response is that,
how successful is it, or is the problem fundamentally that it
is a matter for the governments to take responsibility?
Mr McGranahan: It relates back
to your first question—there are very bad conditions in
a lot of these slums and you have urban growth at the same time,
which in some sense is just a reflection of national poverty,
and you have issues to do with land rights. I would say that is
more on the symptom side. It is a symptom that has to be dealt
with and it helps to deal with it directly as well. It comes out
a little bit in the evidence that you have been given already
but I would say what does not come out strongly enough is the
issue of, for political reasons, a lack of planning for increasing
populations and urban poor groups with a focus on a desire not
to have more migrants come in and a fear that if you fix up these
settlements you just then attract more people and conditions are
going to get worse. There is a kernel of truth in it but not all
that much, and, in terms of the politics of it, it is an issue
that needs to be dealt with locally but it is not just a local
issue; it also becomes a national issue because you need that
balance between urban and rural development, and then it becomes
an international issue because to some extent donor agencies have
reinforced a tendency to see urban areas as standards of growth
and have not put enough emphasis on dealing with poverty in the
urban context.
Ms Meincke: From a street children
point of view the city will always be a magnet. A lot of children
migrating to cities to make a living will end up on the street.
There are also issues to do with the fact that children living
with their families in slums because of poverty will have to work;
the family will send them out to work. Often street children are
overlooked and when you are talking about urban poverty and the
solutions in other evidence that has been given they do not mention
children within these urban areas. You mentioned participatory
involvement as well. If you are going to be dealing with improving
the lives of slum dwellers you have to take into account children,
especially the most vulnerable children, street children. In Tanzania,
where we had a participatory approach, we carried out a needs
assessment in a slum and involved the local government as well.
They were part of finding out what the solutions to the problems
were. A large part of that was building schools and providing
education but it just shows that if you want to deal with the
issue of urban slums you have got to look at vulnerable children
as well.
Mr Rutherford: It is all about
transitions. As a summary, in Angola, in Luanda, you had Portuguese
Luanda which governed the concrete city and it was not interested
in anything else. Basically, they would decide, and it became
the area where the slums developed, and with the migration of
four million people to the capital area during the war people
developed what were called informal agreements to be able to stay
in one place, so there was some form of tenure which was paid
for. There was a whole series of certificates and people felt
they had some control and access over the space they were living
on due to that payment and that certificate. These layers of tenure,
and the dislocation of that informal legal process is not uncommon,
so the question is, if you are trying to develop better security
for citizens, for households but also for business, you have to
move towards a more encompassing legal basis for tenure. However,
how you get there cannot ignore the current situation, and many
transition processes ignore that, and so you have to do the whole
GIS[2]
process of physically mapping with workmen from the Luanda City
Council where people are living and setting against that the type
of entitlement to the land they are living on that they believe
they have, and on that basis developing a whole series of local
regulations which enable some form of transition process to acceptable
tenure. The devil is in the detail, but ignoring the detail can
lead to an enormous amount of conflict.
Q49 Chairman:
But essentially it is a responsibility ultimately of the government
and the local government to facilitate?
Mr Rutherford: Yes.
Q50 Andrew Stunell:
I wonder if I could take you on from that. Poor people living
in slums are not a homogenous group. Perhaps we could just explore
that. The evidence that you have put in makes the point that social
exclusion is a major factor. What would you say are the key groups
that are susceptible to that social exclusion?
Mr Rutherford: That is a good
one. There are two levels of definition, first of all, people's
own definition of exclusion, so developing surveys of how people
feel excluded from their own urban environments. A number of surveys
have done that and done it very well. That is the first part.
Then there are the benchmarks, the MDGs, and government expectations
of what a citizen should be experiencing, so you can map both.
We have done this in Luanda. You can map, again through GIS, where
people have access to water, where people have access to education,
where people have access to basic services. You can then go down
and study who the excluded groups are. That is through age, disability,
gender, a whole series of things. They are not consistent but
you have to get down to the detail to develop services which are
appropriate, for example, water and disabled people's access.
You have to look at specific details to see how you can improve
the situation. If you go back to the first definition, the perception
of exclusion, how people feel excluded, you often get a different
picture. You need to give a voice to the voiceless in that process
and this is where the gender dimension becomes fundamentally important.
In so many areas still there is a great gender democratic deficit
around the world and at a municipal level the mapping of exclusion
is fundamental. In the Luanda Urban Poverty Programme, as with
much of the work of One World Action, is working on developing
participation at the local level which is inclusive. "Inclusive"
means that you are through positive action ensuring that these
women, but also disabled groups, different ethnic groups, become
the drivers in the process of participation through their own
organisations and their own voices, and that mapping of exclusion
becomes very significantly different from some of the official
levels. Bringing the two together by participatory planning mechanisms
and developing more inclusive approaches to local level planning
and service delivery can be a key way of addressing the issues
of exclusions, as we have learned, and the perpetuation of poverty
and exclusion can decrease.
Q51 Andrew Stunell:
Does that answer the question of what works and what would you
see as being the things that work?
Mr Rutherford: What can work is
that there is a greater potential. We have 20 years of experience
of working with grassroots organisations in a number of countries,
and we can confidently say that where you have greater involvement
of groups which tend to be excluded from the local decision-making
in those very key decisions that affect their lives and livelihoods
they will transform in many ways both the revenue that is collected
and the types of services and the appropriateness of the services
that are delivered and also their involvement in the way they
are determined to a certain extent, and that can really make a
difference. A simple example is El Salvador which now has had
10 years of a whole process of participatory gender-based planning
at municipal level in the capital city, San Salvador. Within that
every single policy has to be taken seriously with respect to
gender. In terms of transport policy, the allocation of minibus
routes across the city is in the private sector but it is part
of the planning process in the city council. The way the routes
were allocated was completely transformed with the greater involvement
of women because they were the major users but they were excluded
from the decision-making process beforehand. This led to a major
change in the patterns of economic development for the slums of
the city because women had cheaper access to the markets and so
on. We can go through many examples of bringing that participatory
planning back down to the local level, ie, involving women and
involving them structurally at source can genuinely make a difference.
Q52 Andrew Stunell:
I would like to spend the rest of the morning on that but instead
I am going to ask you whether you think that DFID in its programmes
is responding to that kind of approach?
Mr Rutherford: With respect to
the urban context, poorly. Disproportionately, I suppose is the
fairest comment. There are two pieces of evidence. One is to do
with the Luanda Urban Poverty Programme which was supported by
DFID and has been since 1999, fantastic. For many years it was
one of two so-called urban programmes in Africa, so my case rests
in that sense, and there is a strong pattern, of course, in parts
of Asia and especially in India, as you referred to, but still,
given the need, there is a deficit, but there is enormous potential
for increasing the urban focus within DFID.
Q53 Andrew Stunell:
Do you think DFID has got it right but is not doing enough of
it, or have they got it wrong?
Mr Rutherford: From the point
of view of policy statements and documents since the creation
of DFID and since the first White Paper and many of the intermediary
documents, there has been a fantastic and important focus on strengthening
governance, citizens' involvement in decision-making, and, through
the Gender Equality Action Plan, a stronger commitment, as launched
by Hilary Benn two years ago now, for the whole of DFID to take
on the issue of gender—fantastic. The translation between
policy and practice is something that we as One World Action and
others feel we want to work in partnership with DFID on to make
sure it happens to a greater level. The potential is there but
it is really about how you translate this great commitment into
practice. You are looking at something which affects the urban
area enormously. Citizens' participation in those processes is
very weak, as we know, and the gender dimension remains absent,
or at least challenging, is the best way of putting it. The potential
is there but the practice we need to work on in partnership, all
of us, to try and translate it into a stronger reality.
Mr McGranahan: In terms of DFID's
work, in particular in relation to the gender issue, and you brought
up CLIFF as an example, I think that at one level DFID does not
concentrate much on urban poverty. There is no point in dwelling
on that, but when we are dealing with urban poverty—and
we do not get much funds from DFID so I am not familiar with what
they do on the ground, but I know that they do support work like
CLIFF—if you talk to some of the partners that are on a
programme like that, issues like gender do not typically come
up, but if you look at the way in which they operate I would say
that typically a lot of them work with women's groups and women's
savings groups and they tend to avoid presenting that as a gender
issue, but if you want to re-interpret it in those terms many
of them are very strong on that basis, I would argue.
Ms Meincke: On the issue of who
is excluded, I am going to have to say street children. There
are issues of the definition of street children; it is a really
contested issue. Often we will see that people will think of street
children as not having family contact but the majority of street
children will have family contact in one way or another. It might
not be the kind of family contact we would like them to have but
a lot of them do go home to a place to sleep. We may be talking
of about 10% of street children who do not have any family contact.
UNICEF states that there are 100 million to 150 million street
children worldwide. They said that in the early 1990s. They also
said that the number is increasing but they are still quoting
a number from the early 1990s, so who knows? It is a massive issue.
The fact that we are talking about gender but no-one is talking
about the street children is quite telling. That is why I am here,
to talk about it. In terms of surveys and finding out who the
vulnerable people are, often NGOs and DFID, et cetera, will go
in and they will do household surveys which, by their very nature,
are complicated to do in terms of taking into account children
who live and work on the street. Often as well we have street
children saying to us that their definition of poverty is very
different from what we think it is. We have street children saying
that poverty for them is the lack of family relations, so how
do you take that into account when you go and try to do surveys
about who perceives themselves as being excluded and on what basis?
DFID's memorandum submitted to this inquiry focuses quite a lot
on social protection as a way of dealing with the issue of slums.
Many slum dwellers who do not receive social protection but local
government does not take them into account. They might give social
protection to rural areas but not to slum areas. I have mentioned
the issues of social protection before in evidence I gave to this
Committee's DFID HIV/AIDS inquiry. If DFID is going to expand
social protection as a way of dealing with urban poverty we simply
have to think of social protection in a broad way and not just
look at cash transfers, which is often how people perceive social
protection. Again, with regard to cash transfers to households,
there is no evidence to say that they will benefit children in
a household and they certainly will not benefit any child who
is not in contact with their family or does not have a lot of
contact with their family, so you need to include in social protection
issues of child protection. You need to work with families and
you need to think about it as access to health and education as
well in a much broader sense.
Q54 Mr Singh:
From your answers to the previous question it seems quite clear
that you think DFID has got the balance wrong in terms of tackling
urban poverty and tackling broader poverty, but, to be fair to
DFID, perhaps I could point out that they have a programme totalling
£236 million in India, they support CLIFF, they support the
Slum Upgrading Facility, the Cities Alliance, and they have a
Water and Sanitation Programme for the Urban Poor which aims to
reach 3.5 million people by 2015. So is it actually the case that
DFID does not put in enough resources or is it the case that DFID's
contribution is not seen because it goes through other agencies,
other monies?
Mr Rutherford: I think the work
in India is more the exception than the rule. There has been within
DFID a challenge to have a learning process to benefit from those
lessons because some of those slum improvement programmes go back
a long time in India; I have seen them myself, and it is not only
issues around urbanisation and poverty, as we know; from the DAC
peer review, but institutionally there has been a weakness in
the lesson learning and sharing within DFID. We have worked very
hard to try and facilitate that in appropriate ways, but without
that the critical mass to move forward from those programmes and
learn how to change the context to benefit from them remains a
weakness, and I think in addressing that internally within the
DFID-supported programmes the emphasis has been on that peer review
and the responses since then. When you come to funding of other
bodies, it is the old chestnut of attribution and ownership, but
without the capacity to say, "We have these positive experiences.
We would like to influence where we have core funding", you
are not going to have that follow-through to get it better known
elsewhere. For me that is the core issue, the visibility of its
own programmes within DFID, the lesson learning and sharing around
them. We found with the Luanda Urban Property Programme that it
has been an uphill challenge. We are happy to be in the forefront
of having roundtables, workshops, Chatham House conferences and
so on on the core issues, but it is not enough on its own.
Mr McGranahan: There is a point
to what you are saying, that DFID, particularly in London, does
not have people who represent the urban poverty agenda, and I
have taken people there from IDRC or Swedish SIDA[3]
when they are starting to try and develop partnerships around
the issue, and they do not really have anybody. It does not mean
they are not doing anything, although it does matter and it has
changed. I headed an urban environment programme in Stockholm
in the 1990s and I saw DFID people more then than I do now working
in London. That was because they were taking the lead on a number
of issues, but I think it is important to recognise that you do
not just want to put a PR office in London and pay them to be
doing a lot. You want them to be doing the right thing with the
right money. I think there are a lot of interesting new possibilities
for different forms of aid developing in the urban arena, and
that has an international dimension and they should be involved
in it and they should be involved in it centrally. But to the
extent that they have decided, "Okay, we are not going to
have a person devoting most of their time to the issue in London",
have they picked the right places to invest in for the urban poverty
part? Not necessarily the ones I would pick.
Q55 Mr Singh:
So it is not just a question of the level of resource DFID is
putting in; it is also a question of the profile within the department
of urban poverty that needs raising?
Mr McGranahan: Particularly if
they raise the profile and use that profile to change the way
aid is dispersed. It is not just a question of raising the profile.
Mr Rutherford: Up until three
years ago, I think it is now, there was an urban poverty group
within DFID, a unit, and in the previous restructuring it disappeared,
so I think it has been left as a "virtual group" and
that is about it, and so a number of organisations formed a n
urban poverty group here but we do not have a counterpart to work
with in DFID for this lesson learning and sharing. With respect
to other agencies, the changes in urbanisation have to be seen
in the context of the decentralisation processes which have been
taking place with a strong role for UNDP[4]
with DFID being very active, there must now be up to about 80
countries where that has been a key process over the last decade
plus. It is an absolutely incredibly important process for lesson
learning and sharing because you have had from the early 1990s
until today country after country across the world developing
new legislation for local government and governance. Much of it
is focusing on the municipal domain and the laws around that,
aiming at experience across the world, and there is a lot of sharing
but there is no laboratory or place within DFID to take stock
of those processes and then assess how best to contribute if you
are moving ahead to develop more inclusive, democratic governance,
which is one of the key commitments from the last White Paper.
There is no clearing house for those discussions on how you do
that in a municipal and urban context. There is a major political
lost opportunity there, I think.
Q56 Hugh Bayley:
What that DFID is not doing at the moment in sub-Saharan Africa
would you like to see it doing, and if it was increasing its programme
of work in slums where is more work most desperately needed?
Ms Meincke: If I can answer in
a different way, we generally would like DFID to work more with
street children and take street children into account. There is
a lack of any involvement and overall strategy for working with
street children. We would like to see them in urban development,
but they are not going to deal with the issue of street children
until they have a strategy. On that note we would quite like to
see DFID have more of a child rights approach as well.
Q57 Hugh Bayley:
Can you talk about Africa specifically? It is the fastest urbanising
part of the planet. It is the poorest part of the planet. What
is special about Africa and what in particular should DFID be
doing to address problems of urbanisation?
Ms Meincke: It is difficult for
me to speak directly about Africa in a way because the street
children problem is not just in Africa. As I say, with 100 million
street children around the world we do not really know how many
there are in each continent. Obviously, street children are a
huge problem in Africa, living in the slums as well. Generally
in Africa we would like DFID to work more closely with street
children organisations on the ground who work with street children
in slums as well, but I just have to make the point, even though
you want me to be specific about Africa, that DFID needs a street
children strategy generally.
Mr Rutherford: Could I summarise
it as voice, influence and access, just to warm us up. Building
on the Luanda Urban Poverty Programme experience in Angola, which
is now a post-conflict country but the whole programme started
within the civil war. Since 2002 we have had peace and last September
the first peacetime democratic national elections were held, so
"fragile" is the famous and often used word but the
transition is moving ahead. What is DFID's contribution to that
process? One World Action and the LUPP partners contribution,
can help us to answer your question. First of all, voice. The
support to develop community based citizens' organisations, active
citizens' organisations, even within that transition period, is
fundamental. We all know there are no homogenous urban poor slums;
it they are not there, so you have to support a variety of organisations
and they will ebb and flow and there will be successes, there
will be failures, but the process of strengthening and developing
and supporting voice is fundamental. Without that it is really
difficult to go to the next stage. Next is influence, the belief
that as active citizens you have the possibility, the capacity
and the interest in trying to influence local decision-making
because sometimes the shrug of the shoulders can tell all—what's
the point? It is better to get on with the economic as opposed
to the local political. That space of engagement between citizens
and their emerging local states and municipal authorities is one
to significantly work on. That can involve capacity and awareness
of local level officials, of elected representatives and also
the citizens' organisations, and working on that space to see
that this is a legitimate area of engagement. It sounds academic
at times but it is absolutely fundamental. That leads to the third
area of access—how do you do it? The legal basis. As I said
earlier, there are many legal local government codes which in
different formats have been taken forward. There is legislation
in transition and in progress but it does provide in some countries
some footholds for that engagement. In others it does not and
that is an area where constructive engagement by DFID and others
can contribute to that process. Then bringing the three together
to have active citizens' organisations working in pre-agreed spaces
to try and influence policies and practices which will affect
their day-to-day lives becomes fundamental. The last point is
resources. The Luanda Urban Poverty Programme is absolutely fantastic
in structure and has worked at the voice significantly. Up until
four years ago in areas of a million people we were talking about
budgets of $50,000. Currently it has leapt up to $5 million. The
resource deficit for work in the Philippines is £20,000 for
a year. The local level resources are still absolutely weak and
so there is enormous capacity, which UNDP have been working on
and DFID can support, for developing pilot support for resource
mobilisation at the local level where there is a working in partnership
to increase the local level resources available in order to kick-start
the process that can enable more participatory approaches to resource,
delivery and planning, because at the end of it all we are looking
to a participatory process of planning, which is in a sense the
product of voice, influence and access.
Q58 Hugh Bayley:
If I can pick up on that final point of yours, I am absolutely
committed to, and I am sure the Committee is, and completely understand
why you need participation in local politics and accountability
of the state, but it took you 10 minutes before the word "planning",
by which I guess you mean town planning, passed your lips. What
should local government in sub-Saharan Africa be doing and what
should DFID and other donors be doing to support them to regulate
the way that slums develop or to avoid slums developing in the
first place? I have seen in Africa the most appalling human rights
abusing slum clearance schemes and I have seen much more tolerant
schemes which do improve the quality of life in slums but do not
stop in big slums, and I have seen some really innovatory work
done by radical architects in South Africa to put together budgets
in a middle-income country to do something rather different, and
I have spent some time in Africa with a Moroccan town planner.
What can town planning do to help these rapidly growing cities
to grow in a way that provides maximum shelter, security, communication,
access to labour, at minimum cost?
Mr McGranahan: Town planning cannot
act alone and obviously one part of what needs to change in many
places is that the planning needs to take a realistic view of
how those cities are growing, and that is a very difficult thing
to do when there is this concern that the cities are growing too
quickly, that too many migrants are coming. There is a tendency
to react by saying you get tighter regulations on the planning
because you want to control that process when actually you are
not going to be able to control it, and it takes quite a big step
to get around that. You mentioned that migration was fastest in
Africa and the DFID evidence said that, but my impression from
the statistics is that urbanisation is fastest in Asia. Urban
growth is fastest in Africa. A lot of it is the growth of the
cities.
Q59 Hugh Bayley:
You mean the sheer numbers are greater in Asia?
Mr McGranahan: No. The rate at
which the change in the population is moving from rural to urban
is faster in Asia, but because you have a national growth rate
that is very high in Africa the urban growth rates are particularly
high, but less than half of that is migrants despite the fact
that one of the pieces of evidence was saying that the growth
of Lagos is mostly from migrants. I do not think that is the case.
You are not going to stop that growth by planning slums. I would
not necessarily put it in terms of participation but the planners
have to be engaging with groups and I think to have it really
work well they need to be fairly well represented by groups living
in these areas to develop the right sorts of standards, so the
standards and the byelaws or whatever they call them in the country
are raising up the conditions rather than providing a means of
excluding people. When you have a situation where people are unacceptably
poor they are not going to live in acceptable housing with acceptable
water and sanitation unless you have got some subsidy, and since
you do not have that that is not going to be the case, so there
is a real tension around those planning issues where planning
can become a means of working against these urban poor groups.
Your first question was in a sense what DFID should do in Africa.
They are already doing a number of things but in relation to urban
poverty one of the key things to build on is these groups of slum
dwellers. The one that we support is Slum Dwellers International
which you may have come across. In countries you have groups of
slum dwellers organising typically around savings groups and trying
to federate a deal with these land issues, co-operating with the
government, but one of the key things about it that relates to
engagement in Africa is that rather than picking particular countries
it becomes a regional issue where a lot of the best learning takes
place. I say this as a researcher so I do not like to admit that
actually the people who know most about this are not we research
experts, however much we try. It is people who are poor who are
practitioners and living there, and the best way to get the groups
to understand what can be done, including in the way of planning,
is to go to another slum where things have been done and see that
and to reinterpret it in terms of your local context.
1 Community-Led Infrastructure Finance Facility Back
2
Geographic information system Back
3
International Development Research Centre and the Swedish International
Development Co-operation Agency Back
4
UN Development Programme Back
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